Things in Rings

About Things in Rings

In this game are many Things, things which you must put in Rings. Some things go in, some things go out. That's what this game is all about. The Knower knows the secret rules, but Thing Cards give the Finders tools. They seek to put each thing in place, in a thing-slinging string-ringing rule-guessing race!

Things in Rings is designed by Peter C. Hayward and published by Allplay. You'll attempt to place whimsically illustrated Thing cards correctly into a Venn diagram — each ring of the diagram has a different secret rule known only to one person, The Knower. The first player to correctly place 5 Thing cards wins.

Project Overview:

Development on Things in Rings focused on three key areas:

Alongside designer Peter C. Hayward, lead developer Michael Dunsmore iterated, tested, and contributed design across the game's 72 rules. In Peter's original prototype, the third red ring was Rules Related to the Knower such as "I own one of these things." Under guidance from Allplay, we changed this to Cultural, Social, or Environmental Context such as "Typically found outside." While still subjective, this improved play and better highlights the inductive reasoning of the game. However, this meant designing and testing a significant amount of new rules.

We also spent significant time cross-checking our final wordlist against the set of rules to try to create gamestates with varied placements of cards across the three rings. See more in our case study below.

Services Provided:

Case Study: Mathematical Analysis and Crosschecking

While Things in Rings may be a lighter game, we approached its development with the same rigor and care for balancing we give our large titles. Careful consideration and testing happened across the game's wordlist to ensure a variety of types of nouns (Things) were present, but we avoided certain categories that were difficult place (such as professions).

As the wordlist narrowed, we began focusing more deeply on the rule cards for the Rings. We tested a wide variety of ring rules to ensure they were fun and caused just the appropriate amount of arguments. To narrow to our final list, we crosschecked each rule to try to ensure as many rules as possible covered around 30% of the wordlist. That way, there would be few setups where all words ended up inside a single ring, and few setups where all words ended up outside a single ring. This checking was done by a mix of advanced spreadsheet formulas and by a huge number of manual evaluations by the development team. With 240 word cards to evaluate and 72 rules, that meant over 17,000 pieces of crosschecking, of which about 5000 were done through formulas.

While our judgements for "often has spots or stripes" my not be the same as any given Knower who is playing the game, by reviewing all content against the wordlist, we were able to filter out few rules and tweak others to be either more or less permissive. There is still a high amount of volatility in the box: with 240 Thing cards, you can absolutely have a shuffle that doesn't hit the percentage targets we set. But the time taken to rigorously evaluate the content dramatically reduces the number of setups that create poor experiences.

It's easy to look at a game like Things in Rings and believe the rules can be generated randomly or simply: like any number of Yellow Word Rules for "Contains [A LETTER]", but few of those are consistent, strong cross-sections of the content. If we had included the rule "Contains an X," it would have hit under 2% of the Thing cards.

The production and art direction of Things in Rings really enhances the product, and we love the way Peter's vision as a designer, Allplay's direction as a publisher, and our guidance on content come together to create a great game. As of 2024, Things in Rings had the most successful product launch of any Allplay title, selling over 200,000 copies in its first 6 months on the market.

Praise for Things in Rings

"The flimsiness of Things in Rings' categories sounds like a problem... but it's a beautiful problem, a human problem. Because even the knower is playing the game... grappling with what these words mean." — Dan Thurot, Space-Biff!

"I absolutely adore this party game and it's very rare that a party game makes it to our collection... this is one that I'm going to be carrying on me and taking to all of those social events." — Thinker Themer

Brieger Creative Team